>"The abstraction tower

Here’s the part that makes me laugh, darkly.

I saw someone on LinkedIn recently — early twenties, a few years into their career — lamenting that with AI they “didn’t really know what was going on anymore.” And I thought: mate, you were already so far up the abstraction chain you didn’t even realise you were teetering on top of a wobbly Jenga tower.

They’re writing TypeScript that compiles to JavaScript that runs in a V8 engine written in C++ that’s making system calls to an OS kernel that’s scheduling threads across cores they’ve never thought about, hitting RAM through a memory controller with caching layers they couldn’t diagram, all while npm pulls in 400 packages they’ve never read a line of.

But sure. AI is the moment they lost track of what’s happening.

The abstraction ship sailed decades ago. We just didn’t notice because each layer arrived gradually enough that we could pretend we still understood the whole stack.

AI is just the layer that made the pretence impossible to maintain."

Absolutely brilliant writing!

Heck -- absolutely brilliant communicating! (Which is really what great writing is all about!)

You definitely get it!

Some other people here on HN do too, yours truly included in that bunch...

Anyway, stellar writing!

https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/11/11/the-law-of-leaky-a...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tower_of_Babel

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstraction_(computer_science)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstraction

https://ecommons.cornell.edu/entities/publication/3e2850f6-c...